Message From the Director

You may already know that our community has experienced an unusually high incidence of suicide, especially among our youth. Within a recent span of 18 months, seven young people from the Rapid City area between the ages of 11 and 18 and four between the ages of 18 and 25 have taken their own lives. Pennington County has experienced a steady rise in suicide, averaging twenty suicides each year, more than one death to suicide every month. The life-changing effects on family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as on our community can often be difficult to understand as one tries to provide support to those left behind. Our organization and these families are fortunate to have the support of the volunteers on our L.O.S.S. Team. While we work with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office to coordinate a first response team to the scene of a suicide to provide help and support to family members grieving at such a difficult time, we are also available to provide advocacy visits to people who may have lost someone who was living in another area when they died. Should you or someone you know need the extra support that our L.O.S.S. Team provides, please call me at any time and I will send two members of the team to visit with those in need. The team members are all people who have lost someone close to them to suicide and know what survivors are experiencing. I can also send educational materials and resources to you at no cost.

We are very pleased to be able to now offer survivors the opportunity to attend a support group facilitated by a professional clinician from Lutheran Social Services in Rapid City. The support group is held once a week for six weeks. While the support group focuses on learning the stages of grief and how to begin to recover from suicide grief, being able to participate in this group allows survivors to share their difficult struggles with other people who truly understand what they are going through. That in itself can be part of the journey to recovering from suicide grief. Please consider joining the support group and share this information with whomever you know may need this additional support. Thank you to the generous financial support of some local businesses, we will be able to offer this service to people at no cost to them.

Please help us make suicide prevention a priority concern in our community. We cannot do that without everybody’s help. As I have done in the past, I ask those of you reading this and those of you working with other community service providers to contact us and ask us to come to you to educate you about the warning signs of suicide and what you can do if you are concerned that someone might be displaying suicidal behaviors. While we understand that suicide is a difficult topic to talk about, it must still be a priority concern. We can work together to lessen the stigma associated with it in order to improve the health and welfare of our community, resulting in a more ‘suicide-safe community’.

Due to the May 2nd blizzard that completely shut down nearly all offices and events in the Black Hills and most of Western South Dakota, for the safety of those people traveling, even just within Rapid City, and so more people could attend, we postponed this year's annual Suicide Suicide Awareness Walk to Saturday, June 7, 2008. While it is a time for survivors to honor and memorialize the person they lost, you do not have had to have lost someone to suicide to join us at our Walk. The more people involved in the Walk and all of our endeavors, the more support we can provide to others while hopefully preventing and reducing the number of suicides that our community and so many families and friends have had to endure. Please join us from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. that morning.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon, Community Services Director